1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for generating character patterns and/or figure patterns that can generate high-quality character patterns and/or figure patterns used in data processing systems such as computers and wordprocessors.
2. Prior Art
A modern graphic display generally consists of three components: a frame memory, a monitor, and a display controller. In order to display characters on the screen of the monitor, it is necessary to write the image of characters or character patterns into the frame memory. FIG. 1 shows an example of character data used by the method disclosed in the Japanese Patent Publication No. 53-41017. The character pattern P is stored in a memory other than the frame memory in the form of outline data which indicates the outlines PE of the character. When the character is to be displayed, the outline data is written in the frame memory and the interior space inside the lines is filled before display, or is filled during display by use of software.
In the conventional method for generating character patterns mentioned above, however, it is time consuming to find starting points and stop points of the outline data on the frame memory to fill the interior space between them. This retards high-speed processing of the character generation and display. Moreover, in the conventional method mentioned above, even single points at the tips of a character stroke must be represented by two points because the outline data is always defined by a pair of starting points and stop points in the outlines. As a result of this, the tips of the character strokes cannot form a sharp point when desired. Furthermore, setting the outline data requires the elimination of all interior line segments that occur at intersections of strokes. The task of eliminating these segments is tedious and time consuming.